When Désanges was appointed director of Paris’s Palais de Tokyo in January, it came to some as a surprise. Though no stranger to one of Europe’s biggest art centres (notably curating a survey for Neïl Beloufa in 2018), the art critic and curator hasn’t really been on the traditional museum-director circuit. Instead Désanges, who has for the past decade served as curator of La Verrière-Hermès in Brussels and the Méthode Room, an artist residency in Chicago, has acquired a reputation for using institutions as laboratories for experiments that place the visitors at its centre – which might be exactly what Palais de Tokyo needs to restore some of its original edginess. For its 20th anniversary, Désanges celebrated with a series of events including a festival curated by Marinella Senatore, a symposium gathering other Paris institutions to talk ecological transition and a therapy session of sorts to probe the Palais’s history and via an art and wellbeing programme. Through his curatorial agency, Work Method, he now also directs the long-running Salon de Montrouge, which showcases emerging artists every October.